CHAPTER 1

TELL YOU WHAT YOU WANT, WHATCHA REALLY REALLY WANT

The tears plopped into the foamy top of my Guinness. If you’ve ever been that 22-year-old crying in a bar, you know no one likes that girl. Not even that girl likes that girl. The whole place just wants to boot her sad, beer-tear self outta there so everyone can go back to playing flip cup in peace. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind all the way back to 1½ pints ago.

I was ponied up at an Irish pub in Baltimore whining to my poor roomie about my boss, my dating life, my finances, my family—I was basically face-blast bitching at this poor gal to the point that she finally cut me off: “Erin! OMG. Stop. I get it: ‘Everything is wrong; something is missing; everything is disappointing’; blah blah blah. So what exactly is it that you do want?” Speechless (finally), I realized I had absolutely no idea how to answer her fairly simple question, other than, “Not this!”

You may have picked up this book because you are feeling a little like beer-tear 22-year-old me. Maybe you’re out of sorts; in a rut; feeling stuck, sad, annoyed, lost, or even a dash of all of the above. Or maybe you’re crystal clear on what it is you’re chasing down, what it is you need to rise above, and what it is you need to feel, and you’re just looking for the how. If you are the latter, congrats on knowing your why. You may pass Go, collect $200, and proceed to Chapter 2. See you there in a few.

But if you aren’t exactly sure what’s wrong or what’s in your way—you just know something is—let’s unpack it together, right now. Wherever you are reading this—on a plane, on a train, or in your favorite Lux Lyft—do me a favor. I’m going to ask you to please close this book, shut your eyes, and take three big deep breaths in through your nose and let them out through your mouth. Let’s do it together right now. (Yes, I’m asking you to take a pause on reading this book when we’re only on Chapter 1.)

Welcome back. Don’t you feel the tiniest bit better already? Same! OK, enough Zen stuff: let’s roll up our sleeves and unpack this thing properly.

While only you can define what your leveled-up life might look and feel like, I’m going to make a fairly safe assumption and say that no matter what the specifics are, you’re likely in the mood or mindset to discover new ways to live a life that you really, truly, madly love. Like a life you love so much that if your life were a person, you would want to marry it. Sounds like a deceptively simple goal, but if it were, we wouldn’t be reading books, listening to podcasts, sharing motivational quotes, doing health challenges, journaling, planning, affirming, and downward-dogging our asses off, now would we?

See, the thing about the goal of living a life you love is it’s a moving-target goal. It’s not like weighing 140 pounds, making a million dollars in one year, or cutting down your social media time to less than an hour a day (#mygoals). It’s not a goal with a clear end point, where once you hit it, you think, yay! I did it! No. Living a life that you love is bigger. It’s messier. It’s more complicated. And it changes. A lot. It’s not a mountain you just climb to the top of and then sit on for the rest of your life. Because staring at the view from the top is spectacular, until you get bored, tired, or hungry or your gaze falls on an even more spectacular peak to summit.

What made you happy last year or five years ago might not be making you as thrilled today. Or maybe you thought someone, someplace, or something new would be the ticket, only to discover it was quite the opposite. Maybe you’re currently smack-dab in a situation that you know is right for you, but you’re finding that you have to fight Mr.-Miyagi-and-Daniel-san style to defend it, nurture it, or save it. Maybe you can’t define what it is yet, but you have that restless, itching vibe that’s letting you know that it’s long overdue that you figure it out. No matter what season you are weathering right now, what we all know to be true is that you cannot possibly achieve—for now at least—what you haven’t precisely identified. So together, we’re going to stop wallowing, wishing, and bitching. We’re going to step away from the fog machine (is that still a thing?) toward the light and define with crystal clarity exactly what it is you need to unlock your biggest, most bodacious potential. Doesn’t that sound fantastic? I know. But before we get started, there is one thing we need to go ahead and address.

THE BIG MISTAKE

If GIFs could exist inside books, this is where I would put one of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman holding up her Beverly Hills shopping bags and saying, “Big mistake. Big. Huge.” Because it’s the biggest mistake that we all don’t even realize we’re making. It’s a misstep akin to building the foundation for your success headquarters right smack-dab on an earthquake fault line.

When you feel trapped, restless, or unfulfilled, when you want to shake up your current reality or level up to the next chapter of your life, where do you typically start? If you’re like most people, your knee-jerk reaction is probably to start to look around. Maybe you start by looking for answers from the people you trust, like your friends, your family, your romantic partner, or that really enlightened Starbucks barista. You might look externally to those neighbors or coworkers who seem to “have their shit together” to help solve the puzzle of where to best spend your precious time and energy. And when you really run out of patience during your search, you might ask them, “Well, what do you think I should do?” And when their answers still don’t cut it, you might turn to the most credible and sage of sources: the internet. Suddenly it’s 3 a.m., and you watch as your fingers are typing the most absurd questions into that blank little bar with the same high hopes you had for that magic 8 ball during your sixth grade sleepover. Ah, yes, surely the Google genie will grant the answers to your most mystifying life questions.

Here’s the thing: you can ask every cousin and Nordstrom’s salesperson under the sun, and you can Google until your fingers fall off, but you know, deep down, that you are wasting your most precious, non-reclaimable resource. There is truly only one way to sort out the sadness over your stuckness, and that is to crank up the volume on your inner GPS lady. What would actually happen if you listened to that turn-by-turn guidance, that “higher you” that secretly was already programmed to know the right route for your life’s journey? See, here’s the thing: discovering your path to positivity, happiness, and success actually has nothing to do with searching and everything to do with authorizing. (And I don’t mean credit cards.) No, locating your lane begins when you have the audacity to authorize your heart to tell you what, deep down, you surreptitiously already know. Your intuition, your internal GPS, is fully charged and standing by, locked and loaded to deliver that glorious guidance for exactly what it is your soul seeks.

When you authorize yourself to be gutsy enough to listen, you’ll discover those precious answers that the world’s largest search engine will never come even remotely close to delivering. When you authorize yourself to stop looking around and start listening within, you’ll finally know with crystal clarity the right road for you. And if you’ll just join me for a quick flashback to a particularly pathetic buzzed boo-hoo, I’ll prove it to you.

FROM WHINING TO SHINING

Baltimore, Maryland (known to the locals as Smalltimore because everyone is one connection away from knowing everyone else), is a lovely place where most locals proudly follow a delightful, predetermined “standard life plan.” The typical life recipe in MD is one part crab cakes, one part football, and two parts family tradition.

Broken down, the Baltimore/Smalltimore milestone checklist goes something like this: You live in the city and get drunk in dark, historical bars until you’re 25 (where the beer tears transpired). You get married by 30 at the latest and pop out 2.1 to 3.5 kids. You finance a nice big house out in the burbs and furnish it to Pinterest perfection with the holy trifecta of Pottery Barn, West Elm, and HomeGoods. You “Live, Laugh, Love” while working your nine-to-five job. You drive in 2 hours of apocalyptic traffic to visit Ocean City, Maryland in the summer and hang out with your friends from high school and ultimately experience a fun, safe, enjoyable life until you die. Then your friends and family throw you a banger of a funeral party because (1) a lot of people on the East Coast are Irish and their wakes are more fun than most people’s weddings, and (2) even if you aren’t Irish, people from Smalltimore (and most small towns, really) know how to party better than anyone. When all is said and done, you look down from heaven with a satisfied smile, fist-bumping your parents who, while you were all on earth, lived within driving distance of you and your gorgeous, perfect children. Life? Check. And cheers!

Now, if you’re nodding your head like, “Yes! Sounds perfect!” #1 YAY—do it! And #2—trust me; I was more than happy with my standard life plan subscription until one fateful business trip to sunny Southern California.

I will never forget almost driving that PT Cruiser rental off the side of the Pacific Coast Highway when, as I came around a curving hill, the gleaming, azure Pacific Ocean suddenly opened up in front of me with breathtaking beauty. I had never seen anything like that in my entire life. Like a total psycho, without even thinking I (or I guess my “higher me”) said, out loud, to no one, “Someday, I will live here.” I remember it coming out of my mouth and literally surprising me. Like I spoke without meaning to. It was like my internal posh-voiced GPS was politely but firmly informing me, “Dahling, sorry to interrupt, but . . . you’ve arrived!” Have you ever had that feeling of being so drawn to a place that it’s like you’ve somehow been there before? If you have, you know it’s almost like when you first fall in love with a person—butterflies and back sweat included!

Fast-forward a bit to when I landed back in Smalltimore; I just couldn’t get what I had seen and experienced out of my mind. I just kept turning down the volume on that velvet British voice urging me to get off the “highway” (the East Coast term for big road) and onto the “freeway” (the West Coast term for big road). For over two years, I muted this pull toward the Pacific Ocean because a West Coast detour simply wasn’t listed anywhere on my standard-issue life plan checklist. Instead, like most of us do when we’re too wimpy to try something scary, I complained about it. Constantly. To anyone who would listen.

Which brings us back to my boo-hoo barstool moment where my friend said “Erin, shut up about California already! Everyone knows you’ll never actually go. You’ll be right here in 30 years, just like the rest of us. Let it go!”

Like Marty McFly who goes nuts when someone calls him chicken, that snarky comment was the match my dried-tinder mind needed. Instead of letting go, pulling on my conformity cardigan, and muting my GPS for eternity, something shifted. My tears evaporated, and the navigation volume was cranked to a level that could only be stopped by making the damn turn! Later that night, I watched in shaky disbelief as my fingers jerked the wheel, made a hard left, and booked that one-way ticket to LAX. But it wasn’t booking the ticket that terrified me. Like most times when you’re making big moves, it was the thought of having to tell everyone I’d booked it that had me sweating in my Steve Maddens. Because the truth is that oftentimes it’s not our fear of taking the actual action that holds us back; it’s the fear of everyone else’s reaction to it. And if you hail from a certain crew or clan of people, this fear exists for good reason.

When I broke the news, my tight-knit family and lifelong friends were more than underwhelmed: they were shocked, outraged, confused, and really hurt. My typically sweet and loving dad was so beside himself that he threatened to cut me out of his will if I left! What? A move to a beach town is a matter of life and death now? My friends I’d known for years were understandably offended. What was wrong with Baltimore? Weren’t they good enough for me and my fancy-pants California dreams?

If you’ve ever made a highly unpopular deletion decision: to move, to quit, to decline, to opt out, you know that the bigger your action or change, the bigger other people’s reactions. And those big unfavorable reactions from the ones we love make us feel like we’re stepping in cement when we’re trying to travel through the front door of our dreams. It’s sticky, it’s messy, it’s scary, and if you stop too long to wallow around in it, it will trap you until the end of time. And even though we know that others’ reactions to us are just reflections of themselves, even though we know that people are viewing our choices through their life lens and how it makes them feel, it still doesn’t make it any easier.

While I still detest upsetting or disappointing anyone, as cliché as it sounds, moving across the country with my clothes in garbage bags (what 25-year-old actually owns proper luggage?) sparked a rebirth in my soul that I didn’t consciously know I even needed. But my inner GPS lady sure as hell did. And so does yours. See, the thing with your gut guide is while she comes with mighty, magical judgment, she is missing one functionality: a mute button. And so the only way you can ever actually silence your inner GPS British lady is to follow the directions she demands of you. When your heart is on fire for something or your “higher you” just knows something you don’t, it’s pretty much a complete waste of your time and energy to try and dump cold water on it. In the end, it just doesn’t work. And that really sucks, because daring to live a great adventure and boldly chase down an extraordinary life usually comes with a hefty price tag. The cost is that oftentimes the people you love most might be shocked. They might feel hurt. Worst of all, they might even be offended, like my Baltimore friends and family initially were. The question to ask yourself is: Is that a price you are willing to pay? It’s such a critical query because if the answer is no, then why not free yourself? Release your restlessness and snuggle back into your version of Smalltimore—whether it’s a place, a job, a crew, a habit, or whatever you are fighting to get good with. Because you don’t need a GPS if you choose to stay in a place where you already know all the back roads by heart. And to be sure, there’s an exceptional beauty in choosing that route. Savor that satisfaction and release the rest!

You may have already had firsthand experience with the ugly truth about listening to your inner GPS. The catch that comes with leveling up your life is that it’s difficult to risk hurting the ones you love as you chase down your dreams. But for some of us, the only way we’ll ever discover who we really are, outside of the expectations of a certain work situation, culture, family, or life, is by going out on our own. Sometimes you just have to crawl out on the limb toward the end of the skinny branch with no safety net, no support system, and no “standard life plan” checklist—and sometimes, it’s only there that you’ll find the space, the fear, and the freedom to actually meet yourself, maybe for the first time. And the nonsexy fine print is that once you do, it’s highly likely that you’ll never look back. Or if you do, it’s probably not going to look the same. And it’s that harsh finality of “you can’t go back”–ness that keeps us stuck and cozy and attempting to mute those new directions over and over again.

So here’s what I invite you to process for a bit. The truth is, if you want something so badly that it won’t leave you alone no matter how many months or years you give it to settle down, work itself out, or get out of your system, more often than not, it’s not going to go away. It’s just not. It’s also likely that should you decide to finally listen to your inner GPS lady there is no way to make that turn without ruffling at least a few feathers.

Please hear me on this: If you aren’t changing, you really are choosing. You are choosing to stay where you are. You are choosing to be with whom you’re with. You’re choosing to invest where you’re investing. Warning: more warnings ahead—deciding to stop the thing or start the thing, or to leave the person or join the person, is, in a way, a lose-lose decision. Why? Because when you take a big action, make a big change, or make a big move, someone, somewhere, even if you are a saint, is not going to like it. In fact, if we’re being real, people might even hate it. But the lose-lose is that at the same time this is happening, you are the only one who can tell yourself what you want, even if you feel like a total B while doing it. You are the only one who can pull the trigger and book the ticket or start the venture or yank the ripcord. You’re the one who has to listen to the annoying GPS lady on repeat in your soul for the rest of your life. Not them—you. And if you’re waiting for her to just stop on her own, waiting for the magical moment when everyone loves your big choice? You’ll be waiting for an eternity. And despite our best anti-aging efforts, I hate to tell ya, but we don’t have that long.

Now maybe you don’t need or want to move 3,000 miles away from where you live. Maybe your dream doesn’t require you to give away half of your H&M go-tos so you can fit all your worldly belongings in garbage bags to fly cross-country to La-La Land. Maybe you don’t want to travel at all, especially in a post-COVID world. But where else, how else, can you create the space you need in your life to make sure you can even hear your inner GPS lady? Is it getting up earlier for some powerfully productive time in the morning? Is it trading your Netflix time for a device-free walk around the block? Is it taking a more intentional shower where you refuse to think about your to-do list, but you take those 5 to 10 minutes to just listen? Is it just taking that first step (as you did when you started reading this book) toward contemplating a new deal or a new story for your life? Maybe it’s admitting to yourself that there’s an area of your life you’ve been avoiding or ignoring because when you really give it a good hard look, what you see makes you extremely uncomfortable?

Selecting everyone else’s happiness, preferences, or goals over your own is the path of least resistance. Sure, it makes for frictionless relationships. You’ll definitely win a popularity contest of your family, neighborhood, team, book club, or friend group, but if you’ve been feeling that “itch” or that “ughhh” or that “time to shake things up” pull on your heart, you simply cannot prioritize everyone else’s draft of your life story. Because you will, without a shadow of doubt, lose the “love-your-life” contest with yourself. And should you choose that, you will find that you’ve expedited your life to that awful day you see only in bad movies where the main character is looking in the mirror with horror because she doesn’t recognize the person staring back at her. (And I’m not talking about a simple surface something a few shots of vitamin B, aka Botox, can fix.) Doing what you “should” do simply to avoid making someone else unhappy is a devastating way to go through life. More than that, as my friend Shelley Brown says, it’s total “BullShould.” The simple act of choosing “should” over “good” is your fastest route to travel from anything is possible straight over to I’ll just be over here giving up! The should life, for the most part, is certainly not the good life. So why do so many people that you and I both know keep “shoulding” all over themselves?

IT TAKES GUTS TO GO WITH YOUR GUT

It takes guts to go with your gut. And I’m not talking about pizza cravings in a Poundemic. No doubt, it’s super-crazy hard to go in a different direction than the one that you thought you would, or think you should, or even tougher, the one everyone around you expects you would. It’s monumentally challenging to acknowledge your intuition and go with your gut, but it is not impossible.

Case in point: I’ll never forget hearing my dear friend from college, Cara O’Connor, tell me, her voice shaking, “She’s been in a terrible accident. She’s in a coma, and we’re not sure she’s going to make it.” Cara lives in the same house her family lived in a century ago and her early twenties-aged sister, Carly, had been in a terrible car accident the night before that left her unconscious and fighting for her life. The doctors said she might not ever recover. Might never walk. Might never talk. They prepared the O’Connors to expect the worst.

Can you imagine someone saying that about a member of your family? Over the next two years, Cara watched day by excruciating day as a team of nurses rehabilitated her sister and helped her relearn how to do every single basic human function. And when she eventually did start walking and even talking, Cara’s inner GPS lady began screaming at her unrelentingly and she couldn’t shut her up.

Let’s back up, for a second, to before Carly’s tragic accident. You know that friend who, when you were in your twenties, was essentially the It Girl of your crew? Yep. That was and is Cara. Just like the infamous Andie Anderson of How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, Cara was and is a strong woman with a killer girl crew, rocking her dream job, and working for a global beauty company’s corporate office in downtown New York. Cara was climbing the creative ladder, on track to be one of the company’s key executives, living in a spacious place downtown (which is a rarity in NYC), partying on the weekends, and living her best gal-from-out-of-a-rom-com life.

And have you ever had something so traumatic happen to you where you find yourself suddenly feeling like none of what mattered before that thing matters anymore? That’s exactly where she was: restless, stuck, and processing the fact that those countless hours testing of various waterproof mascaras didn’t hold the critical impact in the world she once thought it did. So she started journaling, as we do, and one morning she wrote: “I want to help heal people. I want to save other Carlys in the world.”

By authorizing her internal GPS lady to speak on paper, the hard left turn on her wheel of life was initiated. Cara began googling (note the order of operations there: soul-search and listen first; Google-search and act second), and phrases like “Certification to help brain trauma patients” and “where to learn to rehabilitate seriously injured patients” began appearing in her search bar. A few weeks later, she had a plan. She was going back to school. She was going to get a degree. She was going to give up her glamorous present in pursuit of not just a new career, but a full-on new life mission.

You might be thinking, Wow, people must have been blown away by her kind, brave pivot. They must have been sooooo supportive of her valiant, selfless reinvention. And, um, yes, kind of, sort of, they were. (Voice goes up here. Always beware of the voice getting higher when listening for untruths.) The truth is, many people cheered her on to her face, as that was the only socially acceptable response; but to be honest, I caught wind of more than one “Has she completely lost her mind?” commentary. (From our Irish friends the response verbatim was, “Sure, she’s gone mad as a hatter.”)

And I’m regretful to admit I was one of them! I’d be lying if deep down that wasn’t my initial reaction. And as her crew who loved her and wanted what was “best” for her, we had a lot of questions. Was she sure she wanted to walk away from her fat paycheck? From a super-hip company? Playing with all the most fabulous, expensive makeup and skin care products and magnetic eyelashes? Was she sure she wanted to freeze a decade-long trajectory to blow it all up and start over? And even then, would she ever make nearly as much money? Or have an iota of the same amount of fun and creative freedom? And most selfishly, how would we be able to afford our anti-aging product army without her hookups? (Remember, reactions are just reflections. How people react to you is almost always a reflection of them and how your actions make them feel.)

I remember looking at her steadfast spirit with awe, asking her how she was able to tune everyone out and stay so sure of such a wild move, of such an uncertain future! Without even a pause in her signature bubbly voice (you know, like that moment in Legally Blonde where Elle Woods says “Happy people just don’t kill their husbands”), Cara said with complete conviction: “Erin. Duh. You can never lose when you go with your gut. You just can’t.”

Like Elle Woods winning that trial and like Cara reinventing her life, that advice is the most deceptively simple advice in the history of sage suggestions! You and I both know that the harsh reality is this: going with your gut truly does take guts. Let’s skim over just a few of the nonsexy logistics that were necessary to actualize Cara’s new adventure. To make this positively outrageous professional pivot, Cara sold most of her stuff. She canceled all her memberships and subscriptions. She moved from buzzing, glam New York to attend the program she got into and could afford, which happened to be located in a decidedly less “sophisticated” Midwest state. (Pleading the Fifth here.) At 34, while many of our old college pals were mortgaging houses and making babies, she found herself sharing an apartment with a crew of twenty-something roommates. Roommates. But Cara was a woman on a mission. She washed her face (with drugstore face wash), cracked open the books, and got down to the business of transforming her skill set to include those of a professional, certified healer. She was basically off the grid for nearly three years—studying, working, and even (gasp!) doing her own hair and nails.

Fast-forward to today, and Dr. Cara O’Connor, has published an esteemed academic research paper on occupational therapy treatments. Now instead of ranking bronzers, she spends her days helping people just like her sister, Carly, walk and talk again after traumatic brain injuries. She is making less money for more hours. And she is way way way living a life that she truly loves. She is 100 percent the happiest, most fulfilled, most passionate about her life that I’ve ever seen her. She is positively glowing with purpose—no glittery bronzing highlighter necessary. Cara knew what she wanted, despite how shocked everyone had been by her decision. She is fully in flow. She is living her purpose, and no amount of money (or free lip plumpers) could ever come remotely close to comparing to that feeling of contentment. No amount of self-tanner spray for life could ever replace the sense of purpose that comes from living her true calling or purpose.

But it didn’t just happen. Cara had the guts to go with her gut. She had the balls to decide she wanted a different deal. She had the audacity to follow her inner GPS lady even when everyone else in the car was screaming “Wrong turn!” She knew better. And guess what: as a fellow gutsy gal, so. do. you.

KILLING YOU WITH KINDNESS

Like Cara, if I had listened to my parents, my aunts and uncles, my friends, my boss (the list goes on), and stayed put in Maryland where everyone else thought I belonged, I’m pretty sure I would have stayed lost. I would have stayed restless living a version of my life that I wasn’t actually destined to live. It wasn’t until I abandoned the “big mistake” external search for answers and tuned into my inner compass that I made a startling discovery: I actually wasn’t as lost as I thought. I actually did know what I wanted—exactly what I wanted, in fact. And it’s my hope that you feel the same about your big life crossroads choices. If your answer is “Yes, but . . . ,” we’re going to tackle that. If your answer is “Not really,” or “I’m not sure,” or “I think so,” or “I’ve never really thought about it,” it might be time for you to consider dealing yourself a new hand.

Maybe you like where you live and you hate California (the “weather tax” is no joke!). Or you already have a sense of purpose in your current job and you don’t want to make a massive career shift. Good news! You don’t have to. Your biggest opportunity for a life-altering impact comes from finding a way to audaciously reinvent yourself within the realm of your current reality. How? Simple: you decide if you’re being the right amount of kind to yourself or killing yourself with your own kindness.

Without cueing up the Roberta Flack song or the Fugees cover, what exactly does that mean?

Well, you’ve heard the saying, “Kill them with kindness,” but what if you’re actually being so kind (or selfless or empathetic or substitute other applauded adjective here) that you end up slowly crushing yourself one tight smile at a time? What if your thoughtfulness takes so much energy to bring that brightness to others’ lives over and over that you’re running dangerously low on the reserves needed to keep your own lamp burning? What if your generosity is so all-encompassing that you are attempting to pour the water you need to survive from an empty freaking cup?

See, what really paralyzes us from pulling the trigger on making big moves is our fear, especially as women, of how our actions will affect our people. Now, thinking through how your decision will affect others in a positive or negative light is obviously being a good human. But if doing the right thing is having an over-the-top negative impact on your mental or physical health, are you sure it’s not actually the wrong thing dressed up in a “Be a good person” graphic T-shirt?

There’s another way to deduce whether or not you’re sticking with something, someone, or someplace for the right or wrong reasons. And it’s something so fundamental, so basic, so primal that we don’t even recognize it as one of the top methods our inner GPS lady uses to flag our attention: sleep.

If you can’t sleep at night or you feel tired no matter how many almond milk lattes you swig, unless you have a newborn baby or puppy, you are overindexing on everyone else. An inability to sleep or ever feel “rested” is your subconscious’s last-ditch effort to get your attention before you continue on what could be a decidedly ditch-bound direction. You could be actually killing yourself with too much “kindness” toward your romantic partner, your child, your extended family, your boss, your clients, or even your dog. And if you’re finding yourself currently in the middle of a situation like one of my dearest friends did, where it’s an exhausting combination of all the things, it’s high time for you and me to sort that shit out.

I wish you could meet my friend Kate. Her backstory is that she’s the youngest of a large blended family; her parents divorced and married a few different partners over the years, and from a life of constant moving and mayhem, she learned to be a “perfect” go-with-the-flow pleaser. She’s her absolute happiest when she receives positive feedback from her people. This never really impacted her negatively; in fact, quite the contrary, as she has more friends than most, though things have changed after she started a family of her own.

Over the last five years, she has found herself stuck in a death-by-kindness cycle of trying to make everyone else in her world so happy that at the end of every night even her fingernails feel exhausted. Now I can hear you thinking, OK, Erin, we’re all a little tired, so what? We’re not talking “Need a nap at 3 p.m.” or “Why I am in my jammies at 8 p.m.” levels of tired. We’re talking fully caffeinated, midmorning, potentially able to cry on command. We’re talking mind, body, and soul sleep-deprived.

Now, sweet reader, I can hear you defending Kate. Well, she has a lot of responsibilities: What do you expect? And look, far be it from me to ever weigh in on any parent on the planet with any emotion other than sheer awe, admiration, and respect. Full stop. You are doing the Lord’s work on a level that those of us who are not parents cannot ever comprehend, and we honor you with endless gratitude. Thank you for being so selfless in raising the next generation of tiny humans.

Yet spending a recent weekend with Kate in her home and seeing everyone tell her to jump and hearing her ask “How high?” over and over again—it was positively heartbreaking. So over a third glass of wine (and by the way, in the 15 years I’ve known Kate, she had never been a big drinker), once everyone was (finally) asleep, she had the big, messy boo-hoo. And she’s one of those friends who when they cry, your heart shatters into a million pieces because they are always everyone else’s cheerleader. She started letting out a torrent of troubles, listing a million things she hadn’t done in ages; and when she got down to the semicrazy ones like rearranging old basement closets, I interrupted with the aggressive “stop” hand and asked her what was her number one. After a big pull from her Petit Verdot, she expressed, “Sweating. I have to move my body. I have to work out. It makes me feel sane. But I just don’t have the energy. Or the time.”

So, right there, the two of us mapped out a plan that involved a rocket-ship-level mission strategy consisting of outsourcing, saying no, and committing to at least three workouts a week with monetary consequences for accountability. A few months later, to Kate’s credit, she stuck to our pact. Did it take some adjusting from her household crew who were used to having Kate waiting on them hand and foot, like an on-demand superhero? Yep. Did they like it at first? Nope. Do they like it now? Still nope. But are they more than fine picking up some of the slack and sharing responsibilities? Heck yes. And has Kate’s decision to prioritize her workouts over the protests of her dependents infused her life with the energy she needs to show up as her best self to all? You know the answer to this one, friend.

Sometimes what we need is not a revolutionary reset; sometimes what we need is just small, incremental deal-changers to improve our happiness deposits and keep our bodies, minds, and hearts in the black. Most of the time, staying out of the red danger zone doesn’t require a cross-country move or a complete career reinvention; sometimes just a slight reallocation of time and energy can be enough to remove the sarcasm from our versions of “just living the dream.”

DOUBLE DOWN ON YOUR DIFFERENT

As you’re evaluating where you invest your BDE (Big Deal Energy), maybe you feel like in this particular season you don’t have the option to clear a new path for yourself. Maybe your personal responsibilities are making your professional options seem limited. If so, surprisingly enough, you are actually in the perfect place for a little audacious reset. The most powerful way to reboot your current role or actualize your dream one within your existing set of circumstances is to remember that thing everyone always asks you: “How did you do that?” And when people do ask you that, you look at them like they are nuts because can’t everyone do that thing? Pay attention to what comes easily to you, that you do differently from other people, that talent or skill that constantly triggers their admiration. This is the most surefire way to define what type of deal might just be your winning hand if you played it right. No matter what you are facing down right now in your role at work or at home, there is almost always a surprising strategy or solution that only your Big Deal self can see.

Let me introduce you to my friend Sarge. (Sarge is short for Sergeant. Her real name is Ashley. Other nicknames include Maneater and Big Momma, and lest you conjure up an inaccurate visual, she’s barely five feet tall.) Anyway, Sarge is one of those people who stomps authoritatively through life, fearlessly commands the room, bosses people around (but in a hilarious, appreciated way), and just always seems to have all the answers. Sarge is the friend in your life that you bring your totally tangled-up favorite necklace to and she hands it back to you, tangle-free, just in time for happy hour. It’s likely that you know a Sarge, and if you don’t, well, then it’s likely you are a Sarge.

I’ll never forget when she started a corporate sales job and within two years she was outearning the men on her team 15 years her senior, was driving a BMW, and had purchased her own home at the ripe old age of 25. How? Sarge knew she was a Big Deal, and she didn’t really give a rat’s bum whether anyone else agreed with this belief. She constantly, audaciously looked for ways not to try and be better than the rest of the team, but to discover how she could be different. Sarge didn’t try to one-up what everyone else was doing, instead she kept her eyes on her own paper and brainstormed something so outlandish, so untapped, so “that will never work”—that it ended up being friggin’ brilliant. While the other salespeople were chasing down the same classic categories of clients from real estate to healthcare to retail, Sarge took a minute to look inside and ask what she had to offer that none of these midforties, SportsCenter-obsessed, suburban dads did not.

One day, she was driving in Baltimore City in her Beamer past yet another block-long megachurch when the idea struck her like Old Testament lightning. Every business in the city that wanted to attract new customers was already being called on by a dozen Tahoe-driving dads named Steve. But what about these massive churches? Surely, they could also use advertising to attract new attendees. As the sister of a pastor and someone who considered herself to be fairly spiritual, she knew that the megachurches were run not so differently from lay businesses. Sure, the branding was more “saving souls” than “saving money,” but the need to spread awareness at scale was the same.

Naturally, when Sarge pitched this idea to her then-bosses, they laughed at her. And naturally, because Sarge knew she was a Big Deal, she audaciously ignored them and began cold calling and knocking on the doors of Baltimore’s biggest churches. This radically different approach meant that as the only television rep in the city approaching houses of worship for advertising and she quickly amassed her own big book of business while also helping connect the people of Baltimore with an even more helpful type of Big Book. She was helping spread a message she believed in and also used her commissions to buy a home in the city. Let’s just say SportsCenter Steve wasn’t laughing at her anymore.

But discovering your “different” isn’t just something that can be done when you’re at the height of a corporate career. Sarge resurrected this same differentiating technique years later, when she started her own family. She had listened to one too many of her “have it all” working mom friends who struggled with the constant feeling of letting someone down, whether it was kids or clients. The “balance” she observed seemed tough to strike and just personally didn’t appeal to her. She decided that she didn’t want to be a working mom who never saw her kids or a stay-at-home mom without a professional outlet to leverage her hard-earned, sales skill set. She “wanted it all,” but without the pervasive “mom guilt” many of her corporate friends were struggling with. So again, she hit the drawing board and asked herself: Where is option three? Where is the opportunity that most people miss? Is there a different way that I can “have it all?”

She found a work-from-home opportunity, began her own at-home business selling wellness products, and 10 years later, she manages her own independent sales team, is a fully hands-on 24/7 mom, and is on track to achieve her goal of giving her husband the freedom to retire earlier than expected. So what about your option three? What option might you not even be considering because it’s maybe a little more offbeat than the usual paths most taken? Let’s roll up our sleeves, borrow a page out of Sarge’s playbook, and figure out how you can stop trying to be perfect or the best and start discovering your “different.” Let’s deal yourself a better hand.

BIG DEAL DIARY